What Are We/You Playing This Weekend?

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Change! Change is exciting! This week, as I ask the age-old question to you, I’ve also asked it to the rest of Team RPS – those who aren’t swanning around on holiday this week, anyway. What are you playing this weekend? First we’ll tell you what we’re playing this weekend.

Alec: I’ve been quietly getting on with Arkham Knight, as I’ve been a minor winner in the performance lottery. It’s a compelling and generous batsim alright, but I’m not entirely in love with it yet. I can see that those bally Batmobile puzzle challenges are deviously clever pieces of work, but I hate them almost as much as I hate myself for being awful at them. I’d kill for a “just admit the Riddler is smarter than you and maybe then he’ll leave you the hell alone” button.

Alice: With The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth’s expansion drawing nearer, I’m trying to clean up a few unlocks from the base game. Mostly I’m looking into cheesing my way to unlocking its secret character, The Lost. It was meant to be discovered by the community following weird clues and discussing hints together, but someone peered into the data files to discover you need to die in a series of very specific, tedious ways. All this to unlock a character who dies in one hit. Looks like it can be cheesed a little, but is still a nuisance. Also, I’m playing Dive Down to Reach the Mud at the Bottom of Kenwood Ladies’ Pond. I think I’m coming close to winning.

Graham: I’ve spent the week playing procedural detective sim Black Closet, as a petulant response to all the people telling me to play Her Story. It’s by the folks who made Long Live The Queen, and it takes that game’s approach to art and narrative and combines it with crimes – or rather, scandals at an all-girls school for the world’s wealthy elite – that are different every time you play. That stops Long Live The Queen’s awkward collapse into trial-and-error progression, and despite the strange theme, it offers the satisfaction of being a police chief as you order minions to harass, question, stalk and detain your classmates in the pursuit of the truth.

Philippa: This week has been all about Batman: Arkham Knight for me, swishing and flapping about while my forays into the comics get rewarded with references and callbacks. I’ve also had to make room for a couple of evenings of Dota because four industry colleagues and I are sneaking in some practice sessions for an upcoming tournament (The Rektreational). Oh, and I don’t care that this is a PC specialist site. I’m *still* in love with Destiny. Iron Banana is doing my head in at the moment – it’s all Thorn scum and lag. GROSS.

With no evidence to the contrary, I shall assume Adam is playing dinosaur minigolf and John is playing Dodge the Poo. But you, reader dear, what are you playing this weekend?

Thanks for the kind words, but I am fine, have got a new job lined up (was a prerequisite before I spent a penny on anything as frivolous as this PC gaming malarkey!) and now slowly winding down, including absolutely no working evenings and weekends, that’s 1440p time now! And my, the Witcher 3 is rather good isn’t it? And I don’t care what none of y’all say, ‘hairworks’ is totally worth the fps hit, their hair moves!

Haha totally agree ! I’ve been playing the game in 4k myself with hairworks on and yeah I’m definitely a fan of it lol. It’s pretty cool when it rains too and you can see it getting wet. With all the conversations being done in a cinematic close up movie style, I find the hairworks very much worth it! Adds to the immersion.

I’ve been playing it since it released, and still have not beaten it. I’m 125 hours in at level 23 and still doing so much stuff. I still have around 100 ? In skellige alone. Still have notice boards I haven’t even checked and have around 20 witcher contracts needed to be completed and around the same amount of side missions and then around 10-15 witcher gear treasure hunts… that’s not even counting the ton of main story I still have to do and all the missions I haven’t even found yet. Such an incredible and massive game.

I scraped my way through to blowing up the boat, and then had an ‘every man for himself’ scramble back to the dropship. My two support members made it back through virtue of being marginally faster than everybody else.
Not in any hurry to return to it.

I actually did ok by virtue of being super cautious (as always), and fortunately having everyone in skeleton suits, with two support guys among the crew, and a sniper well back anyway. Managed to escape with only minor maiming.

I’ve been playing the Long War mod, by PC can just about manage it with the heat but it’s a bit laggy. A really good mod, but it feels very “cheaty” and I am getting bored as it drags on far too much.

That fisher mission should of been terrible in the mod but I found it far easier then the base game. Probably as I knew what was going to happen, when and where and avoided the triggers until I was ready.

Not sure how you find it “cheaty”, but I find it terribly “grindy”. I’ve basically given up on my current campaign, not because I’m doing too badly, nor am I doing too well, I’m just bored of playing the same maps against much the same foes again and again and again with much the same equipment and skills as I did the last time and the time before that.

I understand it’s a “long” war, but this level of grinding gets tedious, though it seems an integral design decision. XCOM 2’s procedural maps would probably help enormously with this kind of thing, I guess.

Oh yeah it is extremely grindy. I’ve played maybe 50-60 hours and only got 4-5 months into the game and had more UFOs and abductions then you’ll see in probably two normal X-COM play throughs. It doesn’t help that the game punishes taking any risk so harshly that you spend all the battles creeping forward far more slowly then the vanilla game and even that got boring on long missions. I think I have managed to get to only a handful of meld canisters in a couple of hundred battles.

I’m not really sure I can define what I mean by “cheaty” it just feels wrong somehow. I don’t think it helps that every enemy turns into a bullet sponge the farther you get into the game. I guess that I get that feeling the game is cheating because you are doing so many more interceptions, battles and seeing so many more enemies that are much stronger and get even stronger faster then you can, and you are punished harder. It could just be the time that has passed in the last 20 years has made me soft.

So a cousin gave me all her old game CD collection yesterday and, among others, it has two of the Prince of Persia games: Warrior Within and The Two Thrones. Reviews of both are all quite old and rather inconclusive. Are they still worth playing today ?

I have only played the gorgeous cell-shaded Prince of Persia many years back, which had beautiful gameplay but little else. So I don’t have much idea what I’m getting into storywise, just hope they run on Windows 8.1.

There was also a CD of Rogue Trooper, featuring a soldier with alarming shade of blue skin. I’m gonna go into this one blind, probably one of those so-bad-it’s-good shooters.

Well, Warrior Withing and The Two Thrones are rather incomplete without the first game in the series The Sands of Time, because it really is a trilogy. Narrative wise as well as gameplay-wise. SoT is very heavy riddle and jump ‘n run focused, WW is almost nothing but fighting and TTT is a nice balance of the two first games. And all three of them together make one of the bestest ‘game’ evaaar. If you can get your hands on SoT first, then go for all them.

Man, that’s really high praise! I’ll see if the first one is up on Steam or GoG.

Also, I’ve played one of the Prince of Persia games – the one with the cell-shaded aesthetic, with bright colours and strong platforming. So I have some idea about the story (evil Zoroastrian Gods reawakening or something) …

That’s untrue. There IS too much combat – it almost feels like because they managed to improve so much on SoT’s combat they felt they had to showcase it every chance they got – but it’s not fair to say that the game is “almost nothing but fighting”. The reason WW, for all its missteps, remains very much playable – outside of it being the middle act of a trilogy (or quadrilogy, if you add Forgotten Sands, I guess) – is that the ‘riddle jump and run’ gameplay is still sublime.

Sands of Time was one of, if not the best game of the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation.

I liked all three games, but the feel and tone of Warrior Within was off (they went dark, and it didn’t fit with the tone set in SoT). The Two Thrones backtracked on that, but it was the weakest gameplay wise, some of the things they added were weak (chariot races, ugh) and it was rather buggy, but still worth playing (especially if the PC version got patched up).

They also made an interquel called The Forgotten Sands, but that’s not terribly important, though if you finish the first three and want more it’s worth playing. This one is not on GOG, but is on Steam.

All three games are on GOG, so it’s easy to get them all.

That other PoP game is just Prince of Persia (2008) and is entirely separate from the SoT trilogy. That’s includes story and gameplay. I couldn’t get into it initially because the gameplay was so different from SoT, which is what I was expecting and hoping for, but when I went back to it , I really enjoyed it. I’ve been disappointed that it did poorly and Ubisoft never made a sequel.

I really liked PoP 2008 as well but it is fundamentally different from the Sands Trilogy. Not just graphically but also regarding the combat gameplay, the world and level architecture and the story. You should not expect a similar experience.

Sands of Time has the best story, characterisation and ambience. It’s an absolute must play. Warrior Within has the worst story and characterisation but the absolute best parkour action UbiSoft has ever done (although Forgotten Sands was a pretty close second). Two Thrones is pretty OK, but it has weaker plot and characters than TSoT and weaker platfroming than WW.

Can’t reply to your lowest post, but the 2008 Prince of Persia was intended to be a reboot; it has nothing to do with the earlier games beyond the name and loose concept. I enjoyed it, but in general people really didn’t take to the new lead (Edge described him as a drunken fratboy set loose in a Persian carpet factory, or something along those lines) and didn’t care for the gameplay, and it flopped pretty hard IIRC, so there’s not likely to ever be another sequel.

Sands of Time, Warrior Within and Two Thrones are a trilogy, and you do sort of need to play Sands to properly appreciate the other two. Warrior Within has one of the most ill-advised character/art design makeovers in recent memory, but it still plays well and tells something of an interesting story, and Two Thrones works really, really well as an apology for how silly much of Warrior’s CRAWLING IN MY SKINNNNNNNN aesthetic was, as well as being a great game. They all hold up pretty well, though. I envy you or anyone else getting to try them for the first time.

I think the first two 2d platformers and Prince of Persia 3D are considered to be part of the same continuity. The Sands of Time trilogy would be the first “reboot”, while the more recent one would be the second one. Never had much interest in the newer one. Have all of the SoT games but was never that pushed about even the first one. May need to give it more of a chance, though. PoP 3D was pretty shocking, not that I made much effort to persevere. The DOS games are great, particularly the second one, which is an underappreciated classic – much better than Flashback (which overshadowed it with fancier graphics and animation). Can’t imagine The Shadow and the Flame HD on phones being anything like it because it’s bloody hard and needs precise controls. If you’ve got the patience and skill to finish the real PoP2 you’d probably find most modern games to be unchallenging yawn-fests. I’m sure there’ll be more Prince of Persia games in future. Of the core elements to the series: impressive animation and (difficult) platforming, swordfighting and puzzles, I’d imagine that the newer ones will increasingly drift from the latter, with “achievements” for collecting things because completing the game won’t be one.

Man I need to get ahold of them. I played only the first half of SoT back when it first came out on a friend’s PS2. That sands of time mechanic was freaking brilliant, and if anything I’m craving platforming more now than ever (come out already, Hat in Time and Yuka Laylee, jeez!).

It’s more of Portal 2. It’s very good, especially if you’ve not revisited Portal since it came out. The writing isn’t Valve quality, but some of the puzzles definitely are. And it’s a significant chunk of content, I’m 7 hours in, but that might be a measure of how stupid I am.

I just can’t seem to tear myself away from the South Park table on Pinball FX. It’s one of those tables where you can get a multiball on the first ball, and extra balls are easier to get than most tables too.

Also 10 mins of This war of mine doing what I don’t know, I was actually looking for the This tutorial of mine but I don’t think it has one? or I missed it? or do I just go with the flow and use my soild fuel of brain power to crack the gameplay codes?

And the Witcher 3. Two stand out moments, Trollolololo and when I got off my horse in the city, Roach actually roamed to the nearest grass patch, first time I thought naa, conciendence but the 2nd time, I was amazed! That small attention to detail sums up the Witcher and why I like it so much. Of course it all broke down when I got back onto the horse and he couldn’t walk over the 2 inch kerb let alone jump over it. Ah well.

I recently discovered I can play Halo 3… sort of… on my computer. Having never owned an xbox of any sort but always being rather jealous of people who could play Halo whenever they felt like it, I’ve been playing a whole lot of that.
Also still getting lost in the huge tiny perfect futurecity soundscape of Bernband whenever I need take a break from halo and school.
Getting lost in space engine when I just need quiet.

Takes a bit of digging to get it running (have to find launchers and vpns that no one will blatantly tell you where to get) but Halo Online is, for all intents and purposes, halo 3. Just doesn’t have a lot of maps yet, but it does have Guardian so…

A tanky Chanter is quite interesting. Im playing through my second playthrough with one. High Constitution, Perception and Resolve, high resolve gives you a lot of conversation option. Hatchet and Shield and the heaviest armour. Backed up with a monk adventurer as my 2nd in line to give damage (barbarian would work too) and whichever ranged / magical npcs take your fancy.

I wasn’t keen on the chanter, but perhaps I should check it out. I’d quite like a character that can handle themselves solo (for any moments that require that), and then add a few companions on the way. I’m finding a lot of the characters quite fragile, but perhaps it’s because I’m going to places that should be for higher levels (the catacombs under the church in the centre of the first town, for example).

I played it as a Rogue, and for me, that was the perfect “can handle himself solo” class. You can have a traditional party with tank, off-tank, and two casters doing their thing, while your Rogue stays mobile and maneuvers around for flanking attacks. Also good for scouting ahead. It was the perfect party leader for me.

Just don’t expect a Rogue to work exactly the way they do in earlier games like Baldur’s Gate, although the recent change to individual stealth should improve things.

I’m in the same boat. Its the problem I used to have with Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2. I must have done Irenicus’s dungeon 500 times but never left the city. I’m currently trying out a Wael cleric and enjoying lying my way through the conversation trees.

I’m dedicating the weekend to Pillars as well!
I backed it way back when, but I’ve been without a proper computer until now.
So I’ve been looking forward to this to say the least.

The cipher grabbed my attention, it felt fresh and unknown so I went for it.
At first I thought I could use him as some sort of melee caster type, but that didn’t work out, I got my ass handed to me constantly.
However I’ve had good fun lurking in the back with powerful firearms and only entering the fray either to mop up stragglers or when we get mobbed by lots of weak melee bastards.

Apart from that I’ve been hugely jealous of druids in this game.
They’ve got lots of powerful spells that make them a massive pain in the ass to fight.

So I can definitely recommend ciphers and druids, ciphers fit nicely in the story as well.

What’s not clear to people with pillars of eternity is that your character class and so on really only matters in dialogue interactions. You have ample opportunity to pick up every class in the game as you create your party, so if you feel like you want to have fun with more than one class… don’t worry about it. You’ll get a chance at everything. It’s best just to think about how you want to role-play.

I’m milling around with Elite: Dangerous. Really enjoying Powerplay with the Alliance. The Alliance has gone all Eve up in the galaxy, with spreadsheets and flow charts and Reddit discussions on tactics – two faction agreements have already been brokered (one made official in the game by Frontier) – Powerplay is really taking shape, adding quite a lot of depth, though its not without some large drawbacks.

I’ve also been playing Knights of The Old Republic 1 for the first time in 2 years. The writing is a lot worse than I remember but the story is just as compelling as ever.

That and I got in some fisticuffs with older games that refuse to work on Windows 8.1 – I felt like having a bit of a nostalgia weekend but already I can summarise it as ‘IT’S ALL BROKEN – AAARG!’

Subterrain, Eden Star and Battle Brothers. Busy providing feedback to the devs there to help where I can in helping provide constructive and useful feedback. Subterrain in particular is shaping up nicely, coming into focus as something that’s now reminding me a bit of a top down version of System Shock 2 crossed with some Teleglitch and some Doom, good stuff.

Space Hulk: Ascension. It’s really good fun for now, though I do wonder whether it’ll stay fun in the mid- to long-term, or if it’ll start getting repetitive. But for now, lots of entertainment, and easily worth the small handful of currency it cost along with its DLC campaigns on the steam summer sale.

I’m slowly working my way through the Skyrim G.E.M.S. and Skyim S.T.E.P. websites in order to mod the shit out of Skyim. Because it’s way too hot here, it’s not getting any better any time soon and I need a cold game for my mind to retreat into!

But while I do that I’m kinda roaming through Terraria 1.3 and Anno 1404. Again.

ARK is running much better now, I can have almost all the things that makes it pretty turned on, and my FPS stays above 30 most of the time (on a 970 mind you). You can also customize the single player to make it less grindy now. Still loving exploring the island and hopefully not getting eaten too often.

Dying Light, 13 hrs in (29% complete) and getting to more night missions, which are scary but fun. The story and voice acting is all over the place though. Some of the accents are nearly unplaceable.

The voice acting for the main storyline is generally quite strong – I thought the guy who does the protagonist was great, as was the scenery-chewing villain – but the side quests, yes, those are frequently straight into “…where are you from, exactly?”

Dying Light really killed me. Such fantastic gameplay, but with stories wrapped around it which were in such desperate need of some half-decent writers. On the other hand, it’s crap like that which makes me think I might have a shot at getting somewhere as a writer myself.

Dying Light’s main story was quite frequently head-scratchingly silly (if nowhere near as silly as RPS claimed) and the sidequests were mostly just bizarre (why Techland felt the need to make like 90% of them wacky comedy shenanigans I have no idea). But a surprising amount of it was still fairly well written, the lead voice actors worked mightily to sell even the dumb stuff, and some bits were genuinely really good – a couple of the speeches, some of the incidental lines, one or two of the side quests (love the tragic locked-in-the-tower one). Also a lot of the collectible notes were pretty well done. It’s still B-movie schlock for the most part, and it’s very inconsistent, but it does have some real highs. Techland do clearly have some half-decent writers working for them, but they don’t quite seem to have worked out exactly what to do with them.

Dawn of Sorrow’s probably my fav Castlevania, and one of the best in the entire sub-genre. It’s hard to think of anything it does wrong.
Well, okay, except the art style. Don’t get me wrong, I love plenty of anime, but they didn’t need to shoehorn it into a series that already had a gorgeous style of its own.

I can’t help myself but I am still playing Desktop Dungeon. o.O I have a backup plan which is the graphical interface called Vulture for Nethack which I have been playing (and Hack and Hacklite) since before many readers here were born. O.o Woe!

Old school Rogue-er here, myself (Moria etc) and if you haven’t given it a go Darkest Dungeon is well worth the shekels. Not strictly speaking a true Rogue-like, but a very cool concept with an insanity mechanic that really flavors the questing and boogie-man bashing.

I’m aiming to get through some of Fallout New Vegas’ DLC this weekend. So far I’ve only played through half of the Dead Money storyline. It’s a kind of battle royal, set in the nightmare hell scape of an abandoned Mexican village. The whole experience has been deeply unnerving in ways the Gamebyro engine’s clunky framework has never previously achieved. It’s completely separate from the main game, and your character just wakes up in this new setting with none of their gear. As a result the combat mechanics become far more focused on survival and resource management. It just feels like your playing through a bad dream, the kind of dream where all of your teeth fall out, or you can’t get out of the way of car coming careening towards you.

I do wish the survival aspects weren’t so focused on making life difficult, for the most part I just want to get to know the various characters and read some of their back stories, but instead you have to compete with enemies who respawn constantly, a health bar which is always going down because the air is poisonous, unkillible holograms which patrol the area and insta-murder you with head mounted lasers, and alarm bells which make your head explode. On top of all that I was also playing New Vegas on survival mode so I’ve also had to find time to rest, eat and find water. It’s a bit overwhelming and a little too arbitrary at times for my tastes, but I haven’t played anything remotely like it before, so I have to conclude that Obsidian have done a good job overall.

Dead Money is definitely my favourite New Vegas DLC. The holorifle is probably my favourite weapon in the game overall just because it’s so satisfying to use. I also like Old World Blues, except that a lot of the enemies in that are kind of bullet sponges.

RE Hardcore mode (or whatever it’s called: I actually found it kind of unsatisfying. Certainly in the main game, food (and water/beverages) is everywhere, and ammo doesn’t weigh enough to really be a burden (and still forms basically the best loot in terms of value/weight ratio). I didn’t try any of the DLCs with it on though so maybe they step it up there.

Dead Money is bloody wonderful. Probably the best characters in the game. And I actually found myself NOT quick-loading when I screwed up certain conversations because I’d become surprisingly invested in its storyline.

Old World Blues is also fantastic though. Can’t have Fallout without a good dose of completely fruit-loops insanity. Also the new toys are great.

Honestly my favourite thing about New Vegas’ DLC is how well they all fit together, and into the main game. No matter what order you do things in it all ends up feeling like it flows naturally, like it was your journey and it actually made coherent sense. Well, so long as you can suspend your disbelief re: being abducted like three times.

I have been trying a number of different (mostly older) games. Sadly most of them could not really grip me. “Vampire – The Masquerade: Redemption” has interesting lore (if often presented with text-walls) and good atmosphere, but most of the game-time ist spent grinding. It’s actually quite diffcult and the fact that there is no good way to control what the group members are doing has made it all the more difficult. I’m through the first section in Prague and have stopped playing for now.

Tried “Dark Fall: The Journal”, but quickly realized that it was for people that didn’t actually suck at puzzles. Stopped.

“Age of Wonders 1”: Haven’t played it much so far, but I have mostly been thinking: “Why this and not HoM&M3?”, which might not be the best sign.

But I actually finished “Gemini Rue” just recently. I liked it. It was not great, but somewhat atmospheric and with a reasonably good story. Also, knowing that a game is not too long is helpful for my motivation, like it was in this case.

There is basically nothing which I’m still really playing (or would want to play), so I started “Red Faction – Guerilla” yesterday. I only gave it a quick look so far, but I will try to figure out today how I feel about it.

I’ve got a Bloodlines game in refrigeration. Think I went back and played Ultima Underworld all the way through after a while. I’m not ultra-pushed about Bloodlines. There are good things about it but the combat it pretty awful. Will probably finish Ulitma Underworld 2 before I think about going back to it. Find the music really off-putting in that one – it’s so uninspiring, which is disappointing because the first game’s music (by The Fat Man) was excellent.

I enjoyed VTM Bloodlines until I got into some tough combat encounters and then I found it too difficult to continue (I think I’d made poor choices for upgrading, focusing on non-combat skills without realising how much fighting there was).

I have yet to go back to it, too many other games to finish! I did enjoy the spooky hotel though.

I’m (very probably) not that far in. Usually try to roleplay as much as possible and focus on skills rather than combat so I’ve gone for a Malkavian. Did enjoy the spooky hotel, although there was a lot of jumping about and not having a clue where to go next (maybe it was just me). Bad combat is often something I can get past (Ultima VII being a very good example) but it’s important that you don’t get killed all the time because of it.

Ultima VII had bad combat, but it was easy so it didn’t bother me so much. With a more difficult, action-based combat that problem gets a lot worse.

I wanted to play through VTM:B with minimal combat, but as far as I could tell, there was a lot of unavoidable stuff and without restarting and picking more/better combat upgrades I was never going to progress, which is a shame.

I hope you enjoy UW2, I liked that it tied in more with the main storyline, even if it’s probably considered non-canon (although the Ultima canon is already filled with contradictions, but I love the series despite all that). Given the popularity of The Elder Scrolls, I am surprised there isn’t an official reboot of the Ultima series (or at least the Underworld games). I have backed Underworld Ascendant though, so I’m hopeful that will live up to the rest.

Yeah, whatever the reasons the end result with VtM:B is that there is a lot wrong with the game. Just noticed that the original post was about Redemption. Accidentally bought that on gog even though I should have been aware it wasn’t the game I wanted.

It’s sad what’s happened to Ultima. EA is happy to continue to make money from Online but does little else with it other than wheel it out in F2P games. Not the only series they’ve been so conservative with that they’ve destroyed. At least Neurath is working on a new game. Not sure what would happen if EA tried to make a follow-up to Labyrinth of Worlds or Ultima VIII (or Serpent Isle). Conversation wheels and plenty of paid-for DLC would be sure to feature.

You people realize that I was talking about VTMR, not VTMB, right? I know how easy that mistake is to make. ;-) I recently reinstalled Bloodlines, since I wanted to make sure that it actually works under Windows 8 (new Notebook) and I immediately felt at home with the main menu-soundtrack. There are only few games which can evoke this kind of feeling in me by just entering the main menu. Mostly the STALKER-games, but also Far Cry 2 and I guess Baldur’s Gate 2.

Before the unfinished last section of the game Bloodlines did not have a lot of combat in it. Redemption is probably more like 80 % of the game-time. In terms of proportion it’s similar to Dragon Age: Origins or Icewind Dale. Bloodlines is more like Planescape Torment. In spite of all the people with their petty complaints about the sewers.

Yes, I realised my mistake (see previous comment). I’m sure I’ll get through both Vampire games eventually. Remember Redemption scoring very highly in PC Zone (something like 90%). Seems it was a bit of a solo run as very few others thought it was more than decent.

Been playing the same thing I’ve been playing for the past three weeks – Witcher 3. Damn that game is huge, but I do love the variety of quests. Just as I was getting a bit tired of hunting monster and “liberating” abandoned sites I found myself running all around Novigrad doing a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with monsters (other than the human kind obviously). Awesome game. I just hope I’ll finish it with some time to spare before Fallout 4 comes out because I want to get back to Pillars of Eternity, give XCOM Enemy Within another shot (that Long War mod looks mighty interesting), and maybe by that time Arkham Night will become playable. But come Fallout 4 and every other game might as well not exist for the next couple of months :D

Might not play anything. Been away and have lost momentum near the end of my Lemmings quest. Persevered through the buggier levels of Revolution and have had some fun with it, but I’m not pushed. Towards the end they seem to be focusing the difficulty on puzzles with levers, which I find annoying.

Might take a look at something else if I do any gaming. Maybe Realms of the Haunting.

I was recently given a copy of Crusader Kings 2. The fonts are bad (though mods help), the subject matter is horrific, and it plays like a spreadsheet for students of medieval law. Why is it so engrossing?

I had the same response. It might be the best game for medieval studies graduate students but I just bounced right off. The game got quite a bit of critical love and I find it somewhat impenetrable and byzantine.

I’ve only had one serious playthrough, but it’s the chaos and unpredictability that I liked. I started as the Abbasid Caliphate, and managed to expand greatly through the Middle-east and North Africa, before the death of my first ruler lead to a succession of ever more inept sons that split the empire into small fragments.

I keep meaning to go back to it, but it requires quite a lot of time and patience.

The goals? Push through the Jedi Knight storyline in The Old Republic. Maybe even to the end, though that seems overly ambitious. And somewhere in there mix in at least episode 2 and maybe even episode 3 of Tales from the Borderlands. That’d be more than enough to keep me busy, and my TOR subscription has got to be close to running out. I’m clearly going to have to subscribe more to get through all eight class storylines, but I don’t know how much I want to. We’ll see. That said, I also kind of want to play a bunch of other stuff and watch some movies and so on.

I just finished the original Hexcells, for example, though I didn’t get the final “do everything perfectly” achievement and there’s nothing showing which puzzle I messed up on so if I don’t recall (and I don’t), I’d have to do the whole game again. I’d rather move on to Plus. And I wouldn’t mind doing a bit more Binding of Isaac. And I should finally finish my last hardcore Ed the Undying run in Kingdom of Loathing so I can a) try out May and June’s items of the month and b) maybe do this new challenge path some. I kind of lost interest for a while, but July’s IOTM is called a Deck of Every Card and it’s a great, great toy. So that might get me back into the swing of things.

7 Days to Die Alpha 12 just came out yesterday and it’s a whole new ball game, friends. I thought the whole zombie survival genre was boring… until I played this game. (It keeps pulling me away from The Witcher 3.) RPS’s Brendan did a diary of 7 Days late last year and I hope he’ll revisit it again now.

Bought 7DTD on steam sale and haven’t really given it a good go yet. I hear it’s not the same old zombie zapper though, so I am intrigued. Have to pull my nose out of Dungeon of the Endless, Windward, and Darkest Dungeon long enough to do so, though.

It’s been a weekend of Ark so far. Stocking up on narcotics to tame something big, and I finally built a fence around my cliffside house to prevent my dinosaurs from chasing things off of the cliff. The optimization is a lot better after the last few patches, and now I need to find one of the new aquatic dinosaurs to tame.

Witcher 3, I tend to play it for a week or so, then move to something else for a few days before coming back and finding myself a tad surprised at how much I like it. It’s a bit like one of those films where a jaded man gets amnesia and finds himself falling in love with his wife all over again in a heartwarming manner. Or something. Broforce will also get a look in along with The Battle of So,l which I bought because it was late, I was tired and I saw a game that lets me fly spaceships. Also because Elite: Dangerous’s offline reputation decay mechanic and general direction has annoyed me immensely, to the point where I can’t be arsed logging in.

After the Arkham Knight problems I decided to install Arkham Asylum and play through that instead. Picked it up in a bundle bundle a while ago and thought now was the time. Finished it this morning and it is rather good isn’t it? Fingers crossed the Arkhan Knight issues yet resolved soon, but in the meantime l have some DLC to play through on Arkham Origins. In none Batman related gaming I’ll finally be starting XCOM Enemy Within as well as playing some more Dungeons 2 if I have time.

I’ve been playing an early access game called Avenging Angel. It sort of reminds me of STALKER, in that it’s hugely ambitious and sort of wonky. The combat’s pretty poor and the art style is all over the place, but it’s … intriguing.

Still suffering Witcher 3 withdrawal pangs, since I finished it a week ago. Can’t get interested in any other game-type games right now, so it’s just some flight time in X-Plane/FSEconomy this weekend. Maybe some refresher time in Kerbal Space Program, which I haven’t touched in a year, and there have been big changes recently.